Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet by Sharada Dwivedi

Author:Sharada Dwivedi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

SURESH CORDO

Water pots, vessels and foot scrubbers

SURESH CORDO

In the end Miss Blake understood, and even came to join us in the bathing rooms, believe it or not. After about a year of tubbing in private all alone in her little suite, she asked me one Sunday if we would mind, and I remember trying hard not to smile. It was funny and sweet to watch her with us, gradually relaxing, letting her towel slip and scrubbing herself, as we did, with the special yellow clay called meth which we also used for washing our hair. Soap was still not in vogue in that period. We knew about it but we considered it much too drying to the skin. I remember my father actually forbade his women to use soap, especially on our faces.

This clay business was all right as long as our bathing rooms were big and old-fashioned, with plenty of maids to scrub them. But I remember my aunt telling us about the senior maharani of a neighboring state, who tried the same thing in Bombay. It seems all her life she’d bathed with nothing but clay, so when she first went to Bombay, she continued as she always had done, though she lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building. Her maids were sent downstairs in the lift every day to fetch earth from the garden for her bath. This went on until the pipes became so clogged that the plumbing in the whole building broke down.

In those circumstances, she would have been better off to use chickpea flour, as we did sometimes, instead of mud. Chickpea flour, mixed with a bit of yogurt or water, makes a paste which really cleans the skin and leaves it silky soft, especially if you’ve had an oil massage first. Our maids would rub it repeatedly so it sort of crumbled off your skin, taking away all the deep-down dirt with it. This sounds painful but it wasn’t. Sometimes we scrubbed extra hard with the dried fibers of a particular gourd, which Miss Blake said was like a loofah. That cleaned very well and it came from the palace gardens, so getting one was not a problem.

Our bathing routine in my father’s palace was much the same as in Madanpur after my marriage, though by the time my second daughter was born, the bathrooms had all been renovated and we had running water throughout the palace. I must be a romantic because I regretted that a bit.

My favorite memories are of the big, steaming hamams and ghangals in the old-fashioned bathrooms.

Surely the most exotic bath I ever had in my life had nothing to do with modern plumbing; it was like something in the middle ages. I went with a friend in Bombay to the old Persian hamam or public bathing cavern that her family sometimes used. My friend was Muslim, so apart from the strangeness of bathing in the hamam, there was the fascination of learning her customs, which were different from those I knew as a Hindu.

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